Simplicity Vs Complexity Quotes

The many Indian religious attitudes without which the distress of India was - and is - almost insupportable. Mr. Nehru had once observed that a danger in India was was that poverty might be deified. Gandhianism had had that effect. The Mahatma's simplicity had appeared to make poverty holy, the basis of all truth, and a unique Indian possession. Indian blindess to India, with its roots in caste and religion. In their attempts to go beyond the old sentimental abstractions about the poverty of India and to come to terms with the poor, Indians have to reach outside their civilization and they are at the mercy then of every kind of imported ideas. Expense upon expense, the waste with which ignorance often burdens poverty. India by itself could not have rediscovered or assessed its past. Its past was too much with it, was still being lived out in the ritual, the laws, the magic, the complex instinctive life that muffles response and buries even the idea of inquiry. For too long, as a conquered people, Indians have been intellectual parasitic on other civilizations. To survive in subjection, they have preserved their sanctuary of the instinctive, uncreative life, converting that into a religious ideal. At a more worldly level, they have depended on others for the ideas and institutions that make a country work. It seems to be always there in India: magic, the past, the death of the intellect, spirituality annulling the civilization out of which it issues, India swallowing its own tail. The blight of caste is not only untouchability and the consequent deification in India of filth; the blight, in an India that tries to grow, is also the overall obedience it imposes, its ready-made satisfactions, the diminishing of adventurousness, the pushing away from men of individuality and the possibility of excellence.